19 Januarie 2018 – Onttrekking van kontant uit die ekonomie is nodig en moet plaasvind, voordat die stelsel geimplimenteer kan word wat die afdwing van die merk van die dier, moontlik kan maak.
Hoe vorder die onttrekking van kontant wêreldwyd??
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-economy-cash-idUSKBN17S001
Fintech | Wed Apr 26, 2017 | 1:52pm EDT
Cashless society getting closer, survey finds
By Jeremy Gaunt | LONDON
LONDON More than a third of Europeans and Americans would be happy to go without cash and rely on electronic forms of payment if they could, and at least 20 percent already pretty much do so, a study showed on Wednesday.
The study, which was conducted in 13 European countries, the United States and Australia, also found that in many places where cash is most used, people are among the keenest to ditch it.
Overall, 34 percent of respondents in Europe and 38 percent in the United States said they would be willing to go cash-free, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos for the ING bank website eZonomics.
Twenty-one percent and 34 percent in Europe and the United States, respectively, said they already rarely use cash.
The trend was also clear. More than half of the European respondents said they had used less cash in the past 12 months than previously and 78 percent said they expected to use it even less over the coming 12 months.
Ian Bright, managing director of group research for ING wholesale banking, said he did not believe people would quit cash entirely, but the direction was obvious.
"More and more people will end up with a situation where they can quite comfortably get by for two days, three days, four days, even a week, without ever using cash," he told Reuters Television.
Payment systems such as contactless cards and mobile-phone digital wallets have become so prevalent the issue has become political in some countries.
Cash-loving Germans, for example, have been concerned that a move by the European Central Bank to phase out the 500 euro note by the end of next year is the start of a slippery slope.
Germany is one of the countries that uses cash the most. The ING survey showed only 10 percent of Germans saying they rarely use cash, compared, for example, with 33 percent and 35 percent, respectively, in neighbors Poland and France.
The survey also showed that, in general, countries where cash is much in use were most likely to want to go cashless.
Only 19 percent of Italians said they rarely used cash but 41 percent said they would be willing to go cash. There was a similar trend in Turkey, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain and even Germany.
(Editing by Catherine Evans)
The rise of the cashless city: 'There is this real danger of exclusion'
Cities from Sweden to India are pushing for a totally cash-free society. But as more shops and transport networks insist on electronic payments, where does this leave the smallest traders and poorest inhabitants?
Scrolling through my online bank statements at Christmas, I was surprised to find I had not removed cash from an ATM for well over four months. Thanks to the ubiquity of electronic payment systems, it has become increasingly easy to glide around London to a chorus of approving bleeps.
As more shops and transport networks adapt to contactless card and touch-and-go mobile technology, many major cities around the world are in the process of relegating cash to second-class status. Some London shops and cafes are now, like the capital’s buses, simply refusing to handle notes or coins.
Could we see a whole city go cash-free? From Seoul to Bergamo, cities big and small are at the forefront of a global drive to go digital. Many of us are happy to tap cards or phones to hop on a bus, buy a coffee or pay for groceries, but it raises the prospect of a time we no longer carry any cash at all.
No spare change for the busker at the station, the person sleeping rough in need of a hot drink, the market trader, the donation box. Although even on-street charity fundraisers are now broaching the world of contactless payments, what might the rise of the cashless city mean for street vendors, small merchants and the poorest inhabitants?
Some experts now fear a two-tier urban realm in which those on the lowest incomes become disconnected from mainstream commercial life by their dependence on traditional forms of currency.
“The beauty of cash is that it’s a direct and simple transaction between all kinds of different people, no matter how rich or poor,” explains financial writer Dominic Frisby. “If you begin to insist on cashlessness, it does put pressure on you to be banked and signed up to financial system, and many of the poorest are likely to remain outside of that system. So there is this real danger of exclusion.”
Ajay Banga, Mastercard’s CEO, has spoken about the growing global risk of “creating islands, where the unbanked transact [only] with each other”.
In India, the question of how the poorest might connect with the digitised world of the middle-class consumer is now of central importance. In November, the prime minister Narendra Modi announced the removal of 500 and 1000 rupee notes from circulation. Part of a wider attempt to jolt the nation into joining the cashless revolution, Modi’s government believes restricting currency and pushing the take-up of electronic payment will help tackle corruption and regulate India’s untaxed, “black” economy.
Saurabh Shukla, the Delhi-based editor in chief at NewsMobile Asia, says he has seen many small “mom and pop” store owners introduce card readers and learn how to use Paytm, a mobile payment platform, over the past two months.
“They realise a big change is here and they are trying to adjust to electronic payment,” he explains. “But they still want to convert back to cash at the end of the working day or the working week. It will be a gradual adjustment. We might not be able to create a completely cashless India, but we can aim to create a low cash economy.”
Modi is encouraging state government to create “smart” cities by connecting their public services with the latest online technology. Officials are aiming to make the Chandigarh – famously designed by modernist architect Le Corbusier – India’s first cashless city by insisting all bills are paid electronically at government offices. And the government of Goa is attempting to turn its capital Panjim cash-free by offering discounts in digitally bought services like train tickets, and by setting up classrooms to teach small traders e-payment technology.
Yet huge queues remain outside banks as many Indians continue to demand cash. Some of the poorest street vendors cannot afford card readers, and have struggled to operate Paytm payment transfers on their mobile phones.
Aires Rodrigues, a human rights lawyer in Goa, says traders in Panjim are suffering. Rickshaw drivers and fish market sellers have been left with no way of accepting payment from middle-class customers now inclined to do everything digitally. “It’s senseless to try to make everyone go cashless,” says Rodrigues. “The government seems to have lost sight of the plight of the common man.”
If India’s urbanites are being forced to undergo digital shock therapy, city dwellers in much of Europe have been moving steadily away from cash. Consumers like convenience. Governments like the idea of tax transparency. And retailers like cutting down on the costs of cash handling.
According to a recent report by Fung Global Retail & Technology, nine of the top 15 “most digital-ready” countries are in Europe. It predicts Sweden could become the world’s first completely cashless society. Niklas Arvidsson at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology thinks it could happen by 2030.
Yet even Sweden has seen an enthusiasm gap emerge, mostly along demographic lines. Older people in the rural north, tending to be the least tech-savvy, resent the economic power of Stockholm and Gothenburg, now almost entirely cash-free urban zones. The National Pensioners Organisation is a key player in the “Cash Uprising” coalition now campaigning to make sure older Swedes can still deposit and remove cash from banks.
Wealth, however, remains the key factor in determining who might be entirely left behind by the evolving digital economy. Some of the poorest people in Europe’s richest cities have found themselves pushed aside.
In Amsterdam, homeless people selling street magazine Z!, the Dutch equivalent of The Big Issue, now struggle to find customers still using cash. Z! trialled card payments by giving a dozen of the city’s vendors iZettle readers back in 2013, but the method was deemed too cumbersome.
“After a few weeks, our vendors said, ‘Look, this is too complicated’,” says editor Hans van Dalfsen. “It became too clunky and time-consuming for the vendor to juggle their magazines, the card reader and their own mobile phone connected to Bluetooth – all that stuff was needed to carry out the transaction.”
Van Dalfsen says he is now talking to a major telecoms company to try to find a simpler way for homeless vendors to accept payment using only their mobile phones, perhaps with help of unique QR code on their ID badge.
“Like Scandinavia, we are close to being cashless in Amsterdam,” he says. “I’m an optimist, but we really need bright people in the tech companies to come up with simple, convenient solutions that work for everyone. We cannot let people become cut off from the life of the city.”
Like many of the world’s poorest people, much of Amsterdam’s homeless population remain without a bank account. So even if they own a mobile phone, most fall back to cash.
Kenya may offer a guiding light here, having found a way to allow unbanked citizens access into the cashless society using cheap mobiles. Launched in 2007, M-Pesa has become the world’s leading mobile money platform, allowing millions of users to transfer money to each other by sending text messages and store their funds digitally without opening a conventional bank account.
In Zimbabwe, last year’s cash liquidity crisis led to renewed distrust in the banks and helped mobile money platforms take off as an alternative way of doing business, first in the capital city Harare, then in rural areas. The country’s most popular text-based service EcoCash now has more than six million users.
“There has been a huge explosion in cashless payments, down to the very poorest street traders using mobile money solutions,” says Nigel Gambanga, a Harare-based technology analyst. “Everyone has begun to realise, ‘If I don’t figure this out, I might not be in business tomorrow.’ People are adaptable.”
Dave Birch, director of innovation at UK firm Consult Hyperion, thinks it would be foolish to insist on clinging on to cash on behalf of the poor. “If you keep people trapped in a cash economy, you leave them to pay higher prices for everything, you leave them struggling to access credit, and more vulnerable to theft,” he says.
“We’re going to replace cash with electronic platforms,” Birch adds. “I don’t think poverty or being unbanked is necessarily a barrier, because everyone has a phone. Given the technology we have, we can develop new ways of moving digital cash around, even on the most basic of phones.”
The challenge for banks, regulators, tech innovators and officials keen to push forward “smart city” initiatives, is to make sure evolving platforms are accessible and keep everyone interconnected.
If we cannot find a common payment ecosystem, we may find ourselves wandering through divided cities, separated by the sound of bleeps and the shuffling of cold, hard cash.
Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion, and explore our archive here
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/analysis/the-end-of-cash-the-cost-of-a-cashless-society-448553.html
The end of cash: The cost of a cashless society
|
|
|
|
Monday, April 24, 2017
John Hearne
India has withdrawn 86% of its paper money in a bid to eradicate tax evasion, but a world that follows suit may not be very democratic, writes John Hearne.
https://letstalkpayments.com/cashless-society-in-2017/
Can We Expect to See a Cashless Society in 2017?
January 27, 2017 By : Artem Tymoshenko
The year 2017 will be a momentous year in the world of cashless payments. Next year, the world’s first Amazon Go food store will open – with no tills, irritating queues or occasionally unpleasant cashiers. All purchases will be made using a dedicated mobile app which, incidentally, the developers say will be free. How does it work? Each customer is assigned a personal QR-code that has to be activated on the way in. Special sensors then track the products you take off the shelves and calculate the total cost. It is also possible to return purchases to the shelves, which is very convenient. The system will be tested first by the people of Seattle where the first Amazon Go store is set to open.
In 2016, cashless payment for any goods or services has become as natural as smartphones, laptops and morning coffee. Against the backdrop of rapid global development of Internet services, the growing volumes of digital transactions seem entirely logical and natural. Some countries are finding the transition quite straightforward and quick while others, on the contrary, are in no hurry to introduce cashless payments, simply out of fear of anything new. Interestingly, in the first group, both positive factors – as in Sweden – and negative factors, such as the unhappy situation in Somalia, come into play.
So what is driving society towards cashless payments?
There are just two key factors behind the popularity of cashless payments: operators and banks.
Cashless payments and, as a result, online shopping, are also tightly bound up with public trust. The more trust the public has in going cashless, the faster Internet shopping develops. At the same time, growth in online shopping naturally boosts the popularity of online payments. The overall result is economic development of the country. How do cashless payments gain popularity amongst the public? The answer is simple: convenience! If it is easy to find a service through any means of communication or device; if the interface is understandable and the standard of service is good, why go looking for cash payments when you can go cashless instead?
People in highly developed countries such as the United States and Canada are the most loyal to banking apps and services. Mobile financial services are popular in developing countries, where a large number of people do not use banking services. The highest level is in India – 46%, followed by Indonesia at 37%, and Mexico and Turkey at 34%. Non-banking mobile apps are also widely used in the countries of East Africa. A study by Nielsen has shown that a total of 2 billion people use “mobile wallets.”
According to the study, interest in mobile commerce and mobile devices as a shopping tool is highest in the developing regions compared with, for example, the mature markets of the US and Europe which are somewhat conservative in this respect. The use of mobile devices for shopping is most widespread in Asia with its well-developed social networks and telecoms infrastructure; the popularity of mobile wallets is also at its highest here – 60% of all users.
A third potential factor in the development of the cashless market is the big tech companies such as Google Samsung, Apple and Alibaba. They are still in the process of getting it together and have yet to show what they are capable of. Nevertheless, the constraining factor for the Google, Apple and Samsung payment systems – the number of physical devices owned by users – may soon disappear. These payment systems are currently being used by tens of millions of people, which is not really a lot compared to the total global population of 7.5 billion.
The situation with tech giant Alibaba is slightly different. Its payment system, Alipay, is not tied to any specific device. A quarter of the population of China – around 300 million people – currently use Alipay, and 50% of all mobile online payments in the country are made via this system. The role of the tech companies will, in all likelihood, continue to grow. The economy of each country where cashless payments are popular has its own catalysts and history, but the end result is always the same – an increase in the overall number of users and transactions.
Where would we be without examples?
USA
In America, almost half of all purchases or service payments are cashless. According to the statistics, each resident of the country has one debit card and almost three credit cards. It’s worth noting that the Americans were pioneers in the field of credit cards, having become the first people in the world to start using them back in 1951. And with the introduction and rapid development of mobile wallets and payment apps, Americans have become too lazy to carry real wallets and notes. Why bother? And indeed, there is little point when you have Android Pay, Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Starbucks’ payment system. The statistics show that half of all adults in the US use their smartphone or tablet not to catch a new Pokemon, but to access payment systems.
UK
In the United Kingdom, the percentage of cashless payments is three points higher than in the US, accounting for 52% of all consumer payments. But the balance of power on the card front is radically different from that in America with Britons holding 1.48 debit cards and 0.88 credit cards on average. The popularity of cashless payments reached “Foggy Albion” only relatively recently – in 2014 when buses and the Underground went cash-free and cashless transactions finally overtook cash payments by volume. Studies show that the average Briton spends just 17 pounds in cash while one in four will turn down the services of a company if it is not possible to pay by card. According to media agency Starcom, over 30% of Britons believe that cash will disappear within 15 years or so, and 73% of consumers are ready to ditch cash forever within the next five years.
Singapore
In Singapore, the percentage of cashless payments is even higher than in the US or the UK – 69% (according to Mastercard), making Singapore one of the top three cashless countries in Asia and the world. The other two are Japan and South Korea. Every person in Singapore has, on average, four credit cards. And they certainly have lots of opportunities to use them, be it cashless car parks and roads, public transport, buses, trains or taxis. You can pay by card everywhere in Singapore – a fact that, in itself, makes the consumer’s daily life much easier. Thanks to some vigorous marketing strategies by local banks, one-third of the population of Singapore was actively using credit cards by the beginning of 2015.
Somalia
Whereas in the countries listed above, the switch to cashless payment for goods and services was a natural development in consumer behavior aimed at making life simpler, more convenient and faster. In Somalia, mobile payments were introduced for a completely different reason. Robbers and dubious payment systems have become the main engines of progress in that country. Faced with poverty, anarchy, stagnation in the banking system, banditry and piracy, people in Somalia have simply begun refusing to carry cash, thereby encouraging the development of mobile payments. Although Somalia is one of the poorest and most dangerous nations in the world, the Hormuud company’s payment systems, EVC Plus from operator Safaricom, and Zaad from Telesom are all working successfully there. In Somalia, you can buy virtually anything by card: food in the supermarket or on the street, and even weed up an alleyway. In the same way that some vendors in Ukraine refuse to accept cards, some vendors in Somalia do not take cash. There’s a paradox for you!
Kommentaar Aangedryf Deur CComment